RRD (Round Robin Database) is a system to store and display time-series data (i.e. network bandwidth, machine-room temperature, server load average).
It stores the data in a very compact way that will not expand over time, and it presents useful graphs by processing the data to enforce a certain data density.
It can be used either via simple wrapper scripts (from shell or Perl) or via frontends that poll network devices and put a friendly user interface on it.